Ben Nizette wrote: > On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 11:30 +0200, Marco Stornelli wrote: >> I could agree, but "the facto" due to UIO license condition, a company >> often uses UIO drivers, regardless performance, debug, etc, only as not >> to public the code under GPL. > > It sounds to me like you think that driver authors can sit down and > decide whether they want to implement their driver in userspace or > kernel space. For 99% of drivers that's simply not true. You *cannot* > write userspace drivers for most hardware, the hooks just aren't > available. UIO is Userspace I/O, not a set of general hooks for > userspace drivers. I known, fortunately it's not that simple or even feasible. Image a network driver with I/O multiplexing used by various processes. > If people want drivers not under the GPL then they can distribute a > binary-only module (though thank $DEITY there aren't many of those > left). Userspace I/O exists to provide good performance interfacing to That's *not* an option, please read the GPL license conditions. At least it's legal gray area. Note that it's not my intention to start a discussion on that. > a family of devices - those which exist just to shuffle data around and > have an interrupt to tell you when they're done. > > Do you have any example of a userspace i/o driver which exists to get > around licencing constraints? There will be plenty sooner than later. What you can do currently with UIO is very limited. Wolfgang. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
